The Female/Male Salary Differential in Public Schools: Some Lessons from San Francisco, 1879. Program Report No. 79-B7.

Strober, Myra H.; Best, Laura

This paper develops a theory of sex differences in the earnings of school personnel, with emphasis on the role of labor market segmentation. Several aspects of the theory are then tested using data for the San Francisco school system in 1879. Section 1 develops a theory of sex differences in the earnings of school personnel. Section 2 discusses the data, the specification of the model, and the regression results. In section 3, the results are used to analyze the components of the female/male salary ratio. The concluding section summarizes the work and briefly compares the labor market in the study with labor markets in public education today. Results of the study showed the importance that labor market segmentation can have in determining the sex salary differential. (Author/LD)